We view killers as aliens, the act of killing as some science fiction concept that doesn’t apply to our everyday lives. Yet you kill every day. Every time you mow the lawn, you kill grass. And it actually screams. Yep, it does. That smell of freshly cut grass is actually a distress signal cast off by the blades–the grass is screaming.

Ok, so you kill and smoke grass, big deal! Well, you also kill animals. Everyday, through our collective efforts, we poison and pollute the world’s ecosystems, directly killing animals. Oh, we also slaughter 22 million of them a day for food.
Over it? Don’t care about animals? Ok, well what about people? Every day our geopolitical actions result in the deaths of thousands. We as citizens are indirectly responsible for wars, but we are directly responsible for the e-waste and other forms of pollution that sicken and kill men, women and children in third world countries.

Indeed, you still don’t view this as murder. And you likely don’t view yourself as a killer. Fair enough. But in the near future, this delineation may not be so clear. Here are 5 scenarios under which you could soon wake up and realize you’re a killer:

Collapse of Society

The apocalypse is a fairly common breeding ground for fantasies of murder. If society suddenly collapsed, how would you protect your family? How would you secure food if currency suddenly had no value? How would you protect your home from intruders? Indeed, there are no shortage of doomsday soothsayers out there who insist the end is near. Often these statements are made a sentence or two away from a Bible verse or a link to an online survivalist shop. But the collapse of society could herald in an age of middle class murder unheard of in modern times.

Government programming

Depending on your propensity to believe conspiracy theories, the CIA has an ongoing covert program to brainwash individuals into committing heinous acts that benefit the agenda of the New World Order. Everything from the Jim Jones Massacre to the Aurora and Newtown shootings have been attributed to psychological operations undertaken by the CIA to instigate mass killings. There would be multiple benefits to this for the state, including having veritable ‘universal soldiers’ under Pavlovian trigger and scapegoats for politically or culturally motivated assassinations, not to mention scientific research regarding hypnosis and powerful pharmaceuticals.

Cult indoctrination

Okay, so you’re a statist, or don’t have the emotional energy to imagine the CIA brainwashing you to kill. There are other, de-centralized groups out there who recruit new members everyday for everything from child sacrifices to hate crimes. There are thousands of cults around the world and some of them make the Manson Family look like amateur hour.

Ender’s Game

All these brilliant gamers, so many targets. It’s a match made in heaven. One of these days the best adolescent gamer in the world could discover that all of his fictional targets were real perfectly calibrated kills. With drones taking over the military landscape, it’s no longer necessary for humans to man the bombers. But why not use our country’s greatest asset–video games and mindless entertainment–as a template for the most efficient killing machine ever?